“And it doesn’t bother you if…” She’d nodded at the sake that he’d ordered for her.
He shook his head. His voice sounded a little gravelly when he’d said, “I like to see a woman enjoy herself.”
She’d kissed him that night, made out with him after their next date, slept with him on the date after that. And it had been good. Better than good. The best sex she’d ever had. Not that she’d had a lot of sex. She’d slept with exactly four boys, two of them just once, and Hal had been the first one with whom she’d had an orgasm. At first, when he’d kissed his way down her belly and gently coaxed her thighs apart, she’d been self-conscious and shy, wondering if she should have waxed, or shaved, or washed herself ahead of time, but then he’d pressed his face right against her, breathing her in, his hands tightening on her hips, pulling her closer, like he couldn’t get enough of her. He’d eased her underpants down her legs, and, before she could worry about how she smelled or looked down there, Hal had done something, made some combination of movements with his fingers and his tongue. Daisy had jolted off the bed like she’d been electrified. “Oh,” she’d said. “Oh.” Hal had laughed, low in his throat, and then Daisy had forgotten to worry, or to think about anything at all. When he raised his face, still wet, to hers, Daisy had kissed him, and she’d tasted herself on his mouth. Hal had still been kissing her when he’d rolled on top of her, pushing inside of her in a single stroke, then pulling out slowly, and doing it again, and Daisy had thought, So this is what all the fuss is about.
When it was over, she’d rested against him, catching her breath, and then she’d gone to the kitchen, determined to woo him, to delight him the way he’d delighted her. She’d cracked an egg into semolina flour, running the dough swiftly through her pasta machine while a pot of salted water came to a boil. She’d cooked the ribbons of pasta perfectly al dente and served them with salt and pepper and good Parmesan and a poached egg resting gently on top. Hal had twirled the first strands around his fork and raised them to his mouth, and from the look on his face she thought she was feeling a version of what she’d felt when he’d done that thing with his tongue. “This is amazing,” he’d told her. “You’re amazing.” Daisy had smiled shyly, wondering how long it would take before they could make love again.
Six months later, they’d been married. Her college classmates had been shocked, some of them appalled, others just titillated, at the idea of Daisy dropping out of school and getting married so young. Daisy’s mother was unabashedly delighted. “Your father would have been so happy,” Judy had sniffled, before lowering the veil over Daisy’s eyes. “He would have wanted to pay for it, too. He wanted to give you everything.” But Daisy’s father, Jack Rosen, who’d spent his whole life being either flush with cash or close to broke, had died of a heart attack when Daisy was fourteen, at the bottom of one of his slumps. There were no savings. He’d left no life insurance, either, and her brothers, twelve and thirteen years older than she was, were just starting lives of their own.
Daisy had abandoned her plan of following her brothers to Emlen, which had gone co-ed just three years before. Instead, she’d moved with her mother to a two-bedroom condominium in a not-great part of West Orange, graduating from public high school, taking out loans to attend Rutgers. After Hal had proposed, she’d told him that, while she knew it was traditional for the bride’s family to pay for the wedding, in her case, that wouldn’t be happening. Hal had looked at her tenderly, then pulled out a credit card. “This is yours, for anything you need,” he’d said. “I’m your family now.”
The wedding had been in a hotel in Center City, a raucous affair that had gone until two in the morning with lots of Hal’s friends from his law firm and college and prep school. There’d been a three-week honeymoon in Hawaii, and then Daisy had moved into Hal’s house, the four-bedroom colonial on the Main Line where he’d grown up, which he’d inherited from his dad, who’d moved into a retirement community after his wife’s death. Vernon Shoemaker had taken almost all of the furniture with him, leaving only a pair of towering oak bookcases in the den and a king-sized box spring and mattress in the bedroom. Other than a pair of folding chairs and a very large TV, the house was empty. Hal told Daisy to keep the credit card and get whatever she wanted.
Her plan had been to transfer to Temple or Drexel and finish her degree, but she’d spent that first year shopping and decorating, settling in. For their first anniversary Hal had taken her to Paris, and when she’d come home she’d been pregnant. Instead of a college graduate, she’d become a mom.